Smut 4 Smut

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (5 stars)

Every Heart a Doorway is a small book that carries an astonishing amount of emotional weight.

At its heart, this is a story about children who have been somewhere else - worlds that loved them, shaped them, and made sense in ways this one never quite does. Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children offers care, understanding, and the quiet acknowledgement that returning is often its own kind of loss.

What Seanan McGuire does so beautifully here is refuse to frame those experiences as delusion or escapism. The portal worlds matter. The longing matters. The grief of being shut out of a place where you belonged is treated with seriousness and compassion.

The writing is sharp, spare, and deeply empathetic. In a very short space, McGuire creates characters who feel fully realised, each carrying their own kind of ache. Themes of identity, belonging, queerness, and neurodivergence are woven into the story without spectacle - simply allowed to exist.

There's darkness here, and tragedy, but also a fierce insistence that every child's story is real and worthy of care. This is fantasy as emotional truth, and it lingered with me long after I finished.

I don't actually have any pets, and haven't for... nearly twenty years now. So this challenge sent me rummaging around my fandoms rather than my living room.

I briefly considered writing about Jannik's cat, Yeti - especially since we finally got a picture of him during Cincinnati - but the more I thought about it, the more it felt a little disingenuous. Jannik is very protective of his personal life, and anything that isn't directly related to tennis performance tends to stay carefully private. Enjoying the existence of Yeti from afar feels fine; dissecting it less so.

What I kept coming back to instead was something I genuinely love about the North American swing: the way tournaments often partner with local shelters and rescues, bringing in adoptable puppies and dogs for players to meet. It's good publicity, yes, but it's also genuinely lovely, and it reliably produces some of the softest, most joyful content of the season.

There's something about watching elite athletes, usually framed as machines of focus and discipline, sitting on the floor making kissy noises at a puppy that is deeply grounding. It also has a way of reminding you just how young so many of these players are. Stripped of competition and expectations, they're just... ( kids with dogs )
(and, as I'm realising, some of these are from Roland Garros!)

And for me, personally, last year delivered some particularly excellent examples.

At Cincinnati, we got ( Darren with a puppy ) - all warmth and ease, completely at home with a small, wiggly creature in his arms and a smile that killed me utterly DED
(also, the man posts pictures of his own dogs to Instagram, including him ( asleep with them ) So. Really. What's a llama to do?!)

[edit] OH! Also, this lovely pupper that Darren and Jannik had been playing with actually got adopted by one of the security guards at the tournament, who changed the pupper's name to Jannik!

And then at the US Open, we got ( Simone with a puppy ), which was... exactly as soft and quietly devastating as you'd expect.
(Simone, on the other hand, posts pictures of ( his cat ) like a proper millennial 🤣